Category Archives: POHU

When POHO isn’t psycho enough – a home network update in progress

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If you’ve been around for a while, you will know that POHO, or Psycho Overkill Home Office, is an ongoing theme of this blog. I’ve described it more than twice as “two comma technology on a one comma budget.” It stands to reason that my home network is in the “psycho overkill” range, with three sites connected by VPNs and internal 10 gigabit networking (40 gigabit on its way).

Disclosure: Much of the gear in this post is Cisco Meraki, and much of that was obtained using employee purchase program benefits as a Cisco employee. As a system engineer I was eligible for free renewals on my licenses for the Meraki gear, but the original licenses and most of the hardware purchases were out of my own pocket. Any other gear mentioned was purchased out of my own pocket through mainstream methods (i.e. eBay) unless otherwise noted. Cisco has not reviewed, influenced, or endorsed this post or this blog, and they most likely won’t.

A photo before everything was recabled. There are a lot more ports in use now.

What’s the POHO like today?

In the past two years I’ve been running a somewhat crippled network, despite having pretty good employee purchase benefits at work. Still, with gigabit fiber and 500 megabit cable, I’m at about 2.5x the capacity of my core router.

I’m running a Meraki MX84 as the core of my home network, with AT&T / Sonic fiber as primary, and Comcast as secondary. It downlinks to an MS42p 48-port switch with four ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet. On the upstream side, it connects via Meraki’s auto-vpn to an MX64 in my shop across town, and to a Z1 Teleworker unit in my garage that keeps some lab gear protected from the world (and simplifies IP addressing).

I have a couple of MS switches around the networks, as well as a Cisco Small Business SG500XG-8F8T, a Netgear MS510TXPP (for mgig POE) and a couple of other brands in use from time to time. Wireless is handled by MR56 and MR34 in the house, MR18 in the garage, and MR16 in the shop.

Unfortunately, the MX84 is limited to 500mbps of stateful firewall or 320mbps of advanced security throughput. I’m getting pretty close to that, but the other half of the uplink is idle unless I switch over to the other side of the MX.

Continue reading →

Treat, no trick: Free VMware premium training for a year if you sign up by Halloween!

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My friend Christopher posted about a 6 month promo for the VMware Learning Zone that was being extended soon. As I’m looking to rebuild some of my VMware expertise (I was a vExpert for several years, but fell out of the program a couple of years ago), I figured I’d give the promo a try.

It turns out that, with the newest link, you can get a 12 month subscription to the “VMware Customer Connect Learning Premium Package” free. It includes the Basic Subscription, exam prep materials for VCP and VCAP (and possibly others), and the VMware Certified Technical Associate content (for the new entry level VMware certification).

You can find the details and “purchase” the free offer at this VMware Learning link. But do it by October 31, 2020.

Note that the VMware Learning portal has a different authentication system/login credentials from the MyVMware portal, the Flings site, or the VMUG site. Or as Christopher said, paraphrasing my gripe:

So while you may have your email in their system in various places, you will probably have to activate your learning portal account if you haven’t had official VMware learning programs before.

The enrollment deadline is October 31, 2020, and will run for a full year once you sign up.

But wait, there’s more

If you don’t already have a subscription to VMUG Advantage, it’s worth looking into. While general VMUG membership is free, the Advantage tier is similar to the old VMware Technology Network (VMTN) which provided home lab/training licenses for VMware products for a relatively small price (currently $200 before discounts).

The evaluation licenses are included under what’s now called EVALExperience. You can get 15 or more VMware products including vCenter/vSphere, NSX, vSAN, Fusion, Workstation, and more, for 365 days per subscription. You also get 20% off VMware training and exams, 35% off VMware Lab Connect, and the only stackable discount on real-world VMworld tickets.

The VMUG site currently has a popup with the discount code ADVNOW which will take 10% ($20) off. Earlier in the year, William Lam negotiated a 15% discount “group buy” which is probably the highest discount I’ve ever seen – 10% codes are available anytime there’s a VMUG UserCon or virtual event, and often even when there isn’t one.

You might check with your employer to see if they will reimburse you for this option, or if you work for a larger VMware customer you might have other license options internally, but if you’re working your way up outside the scope of your current job, VMUG Advantage with the EVALexperience is a great option. It might even get you headed in the direction of vExpert status (which also gets you those licenses, and a whole lot more, in recognition of your giving back to the community).

Happy 8th Birthday to rsts11

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rsts11 turns 8 today. Not the operating system, which is older than your host, of course.

Eight years ago today, inspired in part by Stephen Foskett and the Tech Field Day crew, I started what was probably my third attempt at blogging. Two weeks later I wrote a post loosely based on Tech Field Day 5 (which I attended a small part of–mostly the party), and a happy post about getting a 48 port 3COM switch and going back to Windows XP to upgrade its firmware.

Today I’m back to attending the TFD parties only; after 5 stints as a full delegate and 7 of what’s now called TFD Extra, I went over to the dark side in 2014, working for a vendor, and my delegate page progress is on hold for now.

As you may know, I branched out into the royal plural on the travel blog just over two years ago; rsts11travel still hasn’t found a better name, and I haven’t gone Sinclair on rsts11 itself either.

I have a modest backlog of posts for rsts11 this year, as well as a couple of recent eBay acquisitions to write about (including a whole new home network infrastructure), so despite working for a Fortune 50 company that makes a lot of the hardware I would have written about in the past, there’s still a lot to cover.

Stay tuned in 2019 for more coverage of tech new and old, continuation of the POHO (Psycho Overkill Home Office) theme that’s driven the blog for eight years now, and some more quick takes and soft topics to push us along into what may be the Year of VDI, the Year of the Linux Desktop, or the Year that Marketing Listens To Tech.

Test-driving third party optics from StarTech in the RSTS11 labs

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Disclosures at the end, as usual.

This fall John Obeto asked if I’d be willing to try out some third party optical modules in some of the varied and random switches I have around the rsts11 home lab. Always willing to help a friend and try some new gadgets, I accepted the challenge. Today I’ll give you an idea of why you might consider third party optics for your switching, why you might not, and how the compatible modules from StarTech.com impressed me.

2018-12-01 14.02.27WHAT ARE OPTICAL MODULES?

First, a word on optical modules. For decades, switch manufacturers have made two kinds of ports on their switches, a fixed port and a modular port. Fixed ports were long popular on line cards, where you wanted to get 24-48 (or more) optical ports for fiber cabling into a small amount of space, and you knew your customer was not going to change their optical requirements on the fly.

Modular (or “pluggable”) ports, however, made it possible to sell switches at a lower initial cost and allow the uplinks to be populated later. It also enabled customers to use different connection lengths and media with the commensurate power considerations.

In Gigabit Ethernet (and 1/2/4 gigabit Fibre Channel), the standard has been the Small Formfactor Pluggable, or SFP, module. About the size of a AA battery or a small USB flash drive, it connects to a small blade port inside the switch, and “translates” the connection to short (SR), long, (LR), or extended/extreme (XR) range optics, or even to 1000Base-T copper.

For 10 Gigabit Ethernet (and 8/16 gigabit Fibre Channel), the standard is an extension of the same module called SFP+. Many installations within a rack or in adjacent racks will use copper SFP+ cabling (with no fiber involved), sometimes called Direct Attach Copper or DAC cabling. Continue reading →

Experimenting with Intel Optane at home with the Intel NUC 7th Generation PC

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Welcome back to rsts11 for the summer. We’ve got a lot to cover in the next few weeks.

I haven’t really done a build report in a while, so when I realized I was getting double-dinged for high power usage, I started looking around for ways to save power. One was my desktop PC, which while very nice (with 8 dimm slots and lots of features I don’t use), is using around 250-300W for a 3rd gen core i7 processor.

I decided, based on availability and curiosity, to build out a 7th gen Intel NUC (Next Unit of Computing) PC, which conveniently supports Intel Optane memory. You can read a lot about the Optane technology, but in this application it’s a turbo-charged cache for internal storage. The newer NUCs support it in place of a more conventional m.2/NVMe SSD (used alongside a 2.5″ SSD or HDD), and of course you can use it as an overpriced SSD if you don’t want to use the Optane software.

See my earlier post about an Intel NUC for use with VMware. That NUC is currently running Ubuntu and Splunk for training in the home lab.

I’ll take you through the build manifest and process, and then we’ll look at benchmarks for five configuration permutations.

Build manifest and current prices (July 6, 2018)

  • Intel NUC (NUC7i7BNH) tall mini PC, $450 at Amazon
  • (Optional: NUC kit with preinstalled 16GB Optane module, $489 at Amazon)
  • Intel Optane Memory flash module (16GB $34 – $39 at Amazon, 32GB $58 for Prime members or $72 otherwise at Amazon)
  • Crucial CT2K16G4SFD824A 32GB DDR4 memory kit is currently $310 (it was $172 when I bought it a year and a half ago, ouch).
  • HGST Travelstar 7K1000 1TB 7200rpm SATA drive is $57.
  • Seagate FireCuda 2TB SSHD is $92, with the 1TB version available for $60.
  • Keyboard, mouse, USB flash drive for Windows install, and living room television with HDMI were already in house, but if you’ve read this far, you probably have them and/or know how to choose them. After installation you can use a Logitech Unifying device or a Bluetooth device, but for installation I’d suggest a USB cabled device.
  • Windows 10 Professional can be had for $150 give or take. The actual software can be downloaded from Microsoft but you will need a license key if building a new system without entitlement.

You’re looking at about $1,000 for the full system at today’s prices. If you don’t need 32GB of RAM, stepping down to 16GB should save you at least $100. Continue reading →